Princess Petals
It honestly never occurred to me to make custom flowergirl dresses for my toddlers for my brother's wedding. It's certainly not the way I was raised. I was brought up to buy things off the rack, preferably for 75% off. "You can't design your own! It will never turn out! Oy! Why would you overspend? You'll only wear it once! Look at all these heavily discounted options! One of these will surely do!" This is basically the gospel in my family.
My search began several months ago. I started with Etsy where I drooled over mountains of tulle and was flabbergasted by the thousands of gorgeous, under $100 options. Then, after several sleepless nights perusing flowergirl inspo on Pinterest, I started to rethink things. I had been having such a positive experience designing my own dress (see here), and I really wanted to shoot for the stars with the girls' dresses as well. Once I had the vision for the intricacy of what I wanted, I had pretty much screwed myself out of buying anything ready-made. And the biggest selling point was that I knew how much Stella and Juliet would love to wear what I was dreaming up.
My rationale for going the custom route was that, it's not really any less practical for the girls to have custom dresses than it is for me. This may be their only time to be flowergirls and the special moments will be forever cemented in time in our family. As much as I knew the generations and generations of sale-shopping relatives before me would roll their eyes in disapproval, I just couldn't resist.
I connected with the incredibly talented, Canadian designer, Margalit Azerad on Instagram (2 points for social media!!), and she was confident she could execute my fairytale vision. I thought it would be a huge ordeal to customize dresses for a 2 and 4 year old, but you won't believe what I'm about to share with you. We never even met Margalit!!! I sent her the girls' measurements, chose a color from her swatch chart via e-mail, and shared images with her for inspiration. We corresponded less than 10 times in the course of 2 months and the next thing I knew, I was opening up 2 large boxes filled with 700 pounds of blush tulle. There were moments when I was doubtful, simply because I couldn't believe it could be this simple to custom-make two very detailed gowns for two teeny tiny humans without actually having them present. To my shock, relief, and chagrin, Margalit could not have done a more beautiful job!!!!! I can't imagine the hell it would be to sit through multiple fittings with a rambunctious 2-year-old and a temperamental 4-year-old. Thanks to Margalit, I'll never have to know!
No offense to my family or to Etsy, but I couldn't be happier I made the choice I did! Hopefully one day we'll get to meet the designer behind this petal and pearl perfection!
